ZIP files are a universal archive commonly used on Windows, macOS, and even Linux systems. You can create a zip archive or unzip files from one with some common Linux terminal commands.
The ZIP Compressed Archive File Format
Thanks to the dominance of the ZIP format in the Windows realm, ZIP files are probably the most common form of compressed archive in the world.
While .tar.gz and tar.bz2 files are common on Linux, Windows users will probably send you an archive in ZIP format. And, if you want to archive some files and send them to a Windows user, the ZIP format will be the easiest, most compatible solution for everyone.
RELATED: How to Extract Files From a .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 File on Linux
zip, unzip, and Other Utilities
You may already know that Linux and Unix-like operating systems such as macOS have tools to allow you to create ZIP files and extract files from them, called zip and unzip. But there’s a whole family of related utilities such as zipcloak, zipdetails, zipsplit , and zipinfo.
We checked some Linux distributions to see whether they included these utilities in the standard installation. All of the utilities were present in Ubuntu 19.04, 18.10, and 18.04. They were also present in Manjaro 18.04. Fedora 29 included zip and unzip, but none of the other utilities and that was also the case for CentOS.
To install the missing elements on Fedora 29, use the following command:
sudo dnf install perl-IO-Compress
